Rather Live a Villain
by Random-Battlecry
Summary: But you're not going to die either way, says Claire, so why not give being good a shot? Sylar, Claire, immortality, and pie. Post-series.


**A/N: As usual, fandomly speaking, I am really late to the party. **

**Rather Live a Villain**

* * *

Oh, everyone dies, in the end. Except him. And Claire. He and Claire, they're going to waltz off the edge of the world, explode into space, dissect the atmosphere, give Jupiter a good poke for old time's sake, then come home and have pizza and still be alive.

They would, anyway. If he didn't keep trying to kill her.

* * *

"Why are you even bothering?"

She isn't frightened of him anymore. She's not frightened of anything, anymore. She just sounds exhausted. She raises her arms over her head, stretches till the bones pop. He narrows his eyes at her.

"I get bored," he says. "And I can't hurt you. So what's wrong with poking you with a sharp stick now and then? It keeps me on the straight and narrow, Claire, being able to murder you with impunity. Don't you still want to sacrifice yourself for the good of humanity?"

She breaks his arm when he reaches for her.

"No," she says.

Sylar scowls.

"You're no fun anymore," he says.

* * *

They part ways. Well, if Claire had anything to say about it, their ways would never have come together in the first place. But he knows, he knows, she'd miss him. If he disappeared. He's all she has left, isn't he?

Family, gone. A few generations onwards, now, it's been a long time since anyone has worn horn-rimmed glasses. The advancement that science has made, now, _that_ is amazing. He goes to a university in Norway and studies what they're calling the Angel Particle. Like God Particles, he guesses, only they have to earn their wings. Either way, someone's playing a harp, right.

He goes to France, and learns how to play the harp.

* * *

"Look," he says, "I learned how to play the harp."

Claire glares. That's what he would call her, if he were allowed to give her a familial nickname. Not Claire-Bear. Claire-Glare. It's lethal. He likes it.

"An immortal with ADD," she says. "Cute."

Sylar preens, just a little.

"Aren't I?" he says, and Claire says nothing, only scrabbles in her bag for a moment. After which she gives him nothing but a pair of tweezers and a raised eyebrow.

So he tries to kill her again.

* * *

Claire wants to make a suggestion.

"Rather live a villain than die a hero," says Sylar.

"But you're not going to die either way," says Claire, "so why not give being good a shot?"

He thinks he already has, he already tried that. But, she has a point, that was back when there were people around to see, people he knew. Now, there's only Claire.

He gives it a shot. He gives it more than a shot, he gives it a fair shake for its sugar.

He cures cancer.

He wins the Olympics. Not a particular sport in the Olympics. Just, the Olympics.

For an entire year he does nothing but bake pies.

For the year after that, he has to work out.

* * *

"I've been good," he says to Claire.

She's getting ready for bed. He stands just inside her window— he opened it instead of breaking the pane like he had wanted to, because this is Good Sylar, not Random Window Smashing Sylar— with his hands behind his back, and the expression on his face is filed under Pious in the giant file cabinet in his head. She's looking in the mirror, she's putting some kind of cream on her face. She's not even looking at him.

"Oh," she says, absently.

Not even looking at him, and not even paying him the slightest bit of attention. He _hates_ that.

It makes him snap when he speaks.

"Women," he says. "Give them immortality and they'll hold on to a beauty regimen regardless. What exactly is that supposed to accomplish?"

She meets his eyes in the mirror, her hand pausing on her cheek. The moment pulses between them, some bright spark, some shard of something unnamed and unknowable, of feeling and not-feeling, of pain and hurt and nerve, nerve endings.

"Habit," she says. "It keeps me human."

She spins, impossibly fast, and hurls the jar at him. He catches it, because of course he does, but she looks as satisfied and triumphant as though it's smashed to pieces all over his shirt, as though he's going to be picking pieces of glass out of his chest hair for weeks.

"Maybe you should try it," she says.

Sylar holds the jar up to the light and scrutinizes it.

"Not the right shade," he says. "For my complexion."

* * *

He trips over his own badness, one day. No one actually dies, though, so that's something. But it gives him the taste for it again, it puts that bit of sweetness right under his tongue, at the root of it, and he holds it in his mouth all day.

He's been good, because being good feels virtuous, clean— well, shouldn't it?

But bad, _oh_. Bad is to be bathed in blood, and doesn't that work too, isn't that supposed to wash you clean, _oh_, he doesn't mind leaving smudges everywhere. He's a dirty boy sometimes. Good feels good, oh sure, but bad feels_ damn_ good.

He tells Claire, he tells her that, and he also tells her he thinks it would make a great bumper sticker, and while she looks at him she's thinking, _Lost cause, lost cause, why should I say anything back to him, why should I even open my mouth_, and he smiles at her without quite showing his teeth, because his answer to that is: Because. Because it takes one to know one, honey. Lost girl.

The Claire-Glare.

Oh, he'd missed it.

* * *

"Make you a deal," he says.

"A deal with the devil?" says Claire, and she rolls her eyes like the teenager she isn't, anymore, but looks like, still. Always will be, maybe. Are they trapped in time, or is time trapped in them? He'll use that for his next college paper, next time he decides to go back to college. "Such a cliche."

"Oldie but a goodie," says Sylar, and he keeps his shark's grin to himself for the moment. "I tried being good. You said I should, and I did. I tried it."

"Yeah, and?" says Claire, frowning at a few strands of her hair like they've made some cryptic comment about the disappearance of bees.

"So why don't you," says Sylar, and he flicks her hair out of her grasp without touching it, lifts her chin without asking, commands attention, demands it all, "try being bad?"

Claire's eyes on his. Claire swallowing tight against an invisible hold.

"I won't do that," she says.

"Aww come on," says Sylar, scrunching up his face pathetically. "Not even a little?"

"I won't."

"Aww come on," he says again, more quietly this time, and he moves closer to her. "Claire. Think about this. You've been alive for, what, nearly two hundred years now, right?" He nods her head for her. "_What if we were immortal _isn't such a fun question when the _what if_ part gets taken away, is it. Come on. Aren't you _bored_?"

Another tight swallow. She can't look away. She could, because he's not holding her anymore, not forcing her to meet his gaze, but she can't look away all the same.

"That's not who I am," she says.

"I can see it," whispers Sylar. "Something about the future. It's vague, but— I see you. Being bad. With me."

Claire flinches. Sylar smiles, and Sylar smiles wide. Claire's looking. She's staring, she can't help herself, he's a black hole of a man and Claire is light and she can't, can't escape.

"There now," says Sylar. He moves.

She bites him. Things were just getting interesting, for once, for the first time in a long long longlonglong time, _interesting_, and she _bites_ him. Which is interesting, too, in a different way. She bites him hard. While this does not hold a candle to some of the other things she's done to him— he avoids her when she's around writing implements, for instance— for some reason it seems so _personal_ this time. She bites him to make him back off. She bites him to make him go away.

He pulls back— yelping only briefly, to his credit— and stares incredulously at her. She's breathing hard. She's glaring. He notes the re-emergence of the Claire-Glare with nothing more than distaste.

But there is nothing to be said.

So he darts forward and bites her back. Lower lip. _Hard._ Then he's gone. Oh, he is _so_ gone. He is so _out_ of there, girlfriend.

* * *

He always kind of liked the idea of leaving scars. The one person he wants to scar the most refuses. Balks at it. Heals over. Not even a scab.

_Oh_ that pisses him off sometimes.

* * *

He wreaks havoc when he's bored, till he gets bored with havoc-wreaking, and then he reads Dickens. Till he's bored with that in turn, never could make it all the way through Pickwick Papers, so he turns to wreaking havoc again. Stick with what you know.

* * *

He apologizes to Claire, which just makes her glare suspiciously at him.

"I'm not so good," he says, a little self conscious. "At this whole relationship thing."

"Clearly not," she says, "if you think that we in any way have anything even approaching a relationship."

"A relationship," he says pedantically, "is defined as dealings between persons. You deal with me. I deal with you. We deal, you and me."

"You're a psycho," says Claire.

"See, I think this is where our problems really lie," says Sylar. "You keep on repeating things that totally obvious."

"No, _this_ is where our problems lie," says Claire. "You're bad. I'm good. You're dark. I'm light. You have destroyed _everything I ever loved_ and I'm _stuck_ with you now in a world where you and I are the only ones who never change, never age, and you've been bad and good and bad again and just good enough that I can't bring myself to hate you, I just can't _stand_ you, and you follow me around and then you disappear, and_ I am lonely all the time_, and you show up again and you try to change who I am to suit your whims and then _you think you can kiss me without asking _and you get angry when I bite you and you try to bite my lip off and then_ you come back and want to talk about our relationship_."

He assumes this is the end of the sentence, because she's stopped talking.

"What about a little forgiveness?" he says.

"What would you know about forgiveness?" says Claire, spitfire, hellfire, fire fire fire.

He's quiet a moment.

"I read about it in a book once," he says.

Claire's eyes aren't empty.

"I hate you," she says, "for making me sad."

There are so many, so many other reasons for her to hate him, and she doesn't cite them, and it's only this one, and this seems to Sylar the cause for a little celebration. A little hope.

* * *

"What do you think," he asks her once, "is it us that are trapped in time, or time that's trapped in us?"

They're laying out on the grass. They're looking at the stars. He's not holding her hand, but he can feel the empty space that her hand would fill if he was, and imagination is a power in itself, and he's content enough.

Claire says, a little drowsily, "Why should anything be trapped in anything? It's life, Sylar, not a snow globe."

"A little more life than most people get," says Sylar.

"So count your blessings," says Claire.

He counts the stars instead.

* * *

He is good, and then he's bad, and the world is a chess game, and he's the black, he's the white, and he plays on the board of Claire, squared off, neat edges, black and white morality, and she watches him as a spectator, and she doesn't take bets.

In the end he comes back to it, to being Gabriel, Gabriel Gray, Gray, Gray. Well, in the end he _would_ come back to it. Maybe. But it's all purely theoretical. There are no endings. Every time he thinks he sees one appearing around a corner, it turns out to be a beginning again.

* * *

He saves the world once. But that was mostly an accident.


End file.
